The charity getting the most likes at Grammy-nominated electro-house producer/DJ Steve Aoki’s Facebook page will receive the proceeds from Steve’s donations of $1 from every ticket of his current AOKIFY AMERICA TOUR.

You can *greatly help* BPF — or whichever charity receives the most Facebook likes here by Nov. 23 — to win ~$60K of funds from the Steve Aoki Charitable Fund.

Predictive understanding of the molecular mechanisms of short-term and long-term memory in brains (neuroscience labs are working on this right now in several animal models)

Demonstration that the critical molecular structures of memory can be perfectly preserved at death today using both cryonics and the much less expensive option of chemopreservation and room temperature storage (BPF’s part).

Preserved brains might be reanimated later this century via scanning and uploading into future computers, or by nanorepair and reintegration into a biological body, per the interests of the individual and the capabilities of future technology. BPF thinks this information, and the availability of both options for individuals at death, might convince more people to use brain preservation as a “pause” button on neural and informational death that would otherwise occur at the end of life.

I think people will be given at least two or three choices.
1. Revived into virtual reality simulated world.
2. Revived into an android body in the real word.
3. Revived to a biological body but this might be later than 1 and 2.
I think I would not choose virtual existence because of dependence upon many more things outside of control from the real world. What if an earthquake disrupted all the power supply to the computer doing the simulation. What if the building it was in burnt down. I suppose it might be possible to migrate your being to another computer almost instantly but in some cases you would need foreknowledge of a disaster. Then again in an android body you would be subject to all the disasters that could befall a biological body in the real world. In both cases having many backups in different computers in different areas would solve the problem.
There is one thing that would make both virtual and android more risky than biological body: magnetic pulse weapons, if waring still exists.

I’m not certain what you mean by “matrixsy future featuring gigantic phallic syringes!”
I’m sort of seeing a similarity to phallic images of celebration or worship, that was prevalent in the Roman empire.

I agree that prescription drugs can cause brain decline. Me even as a young person (not so young now) was prescribed phenothiazine type drugs for years. I felt brain dead unable to remember much and everything seemed grey, sleepy all the time.
Anway after a long story I am not taking them any more for 31 years. Instead I have been taking Zinc chelate, Vitamin B complex, chromium picolinate, lecithin oil capsules and now the nutrient that is supposed to stall or reverse aging: COQ10.
That has not only almost completely eliminated the initial condition but quite a few other things as well that were not as serious.
So I cannot understand why mainstream doctors will not open their minds. I live in New Zealand. I don’t know if it is better anywhere else. Maybe a bit better in places like Germany or even parts of the USA (but have heard about a lot of repression of doctors who try to offer things like it in the USA).
I’m not so certain about canabis. I have heard it can cause schizophrenia and causes a condition where neurons clump together unaturally.
I am very interested in Rays Kurzweils predictions and eventual uploading of a persons mind patterns. I hope he and others can succeed in this research without been diverted into something like AI for complete control and surveillance of citizens. (a lot of complaints about NSA in the USA).

My comment did not get placed as a reply to Peter the Printer. It went to the top instead. It looks like all comments are going to the top. I thought the consecutive order might be going upward, not down, but why are is this comment as reply to my own underneath?

Hello Peter. I appreciate these comments, but I believe some of what you write is incorrect or perhaps imprecise. Degenerative brain diseases occur in all cultures as a basic fact of aging – human bodies and brains start dying (imperfect molecular repair) at an increasingly fast rate after puberty.

A few prescription drugs (for any medical conditions, not just psychiatric ones) can accelerate neurodegenerative diseases, oxidative stress and amyloid in the brain. I agree with the sentiment that you should use prescription drugs as little as possible, and that they are far over prescribed, but a few are lifesaving. Cannabis might slow neurodegeneration (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20875047 for a study on that) and curcumin (active ingredient in turmeric spice) and a few other nutritional supplmements most definitely do (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23813102).

Preserving the brain at death is not only a potential palliative for the individual, but for their family, friends, and society at large. For some, this potential change of social attitudes is the greatest benefit they can see from extending the brain preservation option to all who might be interested in it. See http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/overcoming-objections#socialbenefits for one idea of on how societies around the world might change for the better, right now, if 100,000 people did brain preservation in any society, regardless of whether *any* information is ever successfully recovered from those brains in the future.

Even with our primitive understanding of biological development today we know how to grow differentiated biological structures that don’t include brains. So its reasonable that in the future, replacement bodies could be grown for those who have an attachment to their particular biological brain. While we can’t be sure about the longer term future, I personally think this is something very few people will actually do, and that the vast majority of people will simply move their brain patterns from their preserved brains into a computer, as the latter should be a far-less-expensive and much-sooner-to-emerge option.

If you wish to understand uploading, I think the central concept to understand, and have a debate about, is patternism. Patternism states that we are not our matter (which can be biology or technology, as neural implant chips already demonstrate) but we are instead our collection of special patterns. Preserve the patterns, in any substrate, and you preserve the memories, and the person. For more on patternism: http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/overcoming-objections#patternism Warm Regards, JS

New research is indicating that Alzheimers and other degenerative brain diseases are caused by the drugs doctors prescribe old people for such things as: anxiety, sleeplessness and depression.
Yet old people using cannabis for all those concerns rather than prescription drugs seem to be free from dementia. Preserving the brain at death might work as a palliative for those fearing personal extinction, but they won’t be ‘waking up’ either in a new biological body [would the previous incumbent have to be removed first?] or uploaded to a computer.